


who's afraid

by orphan_account



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Rose is briefly mentioned, no plot to speak of, references happen, the TARDIS is a troll
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-19
Updated: 2013-08-19
Packaged: 2017-12-24 00:05:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/932681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the TARDIS and Clara Do Not Get Along, until they do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	who's afraid

**Author's Note:**

> gratuitous overuse of parentheses. not proofread. seems to be missing a plot. i lack the ability to be british. first published fanfic anywhere.

The TARDIS didn't like Clara. 

This was something she knew, and had grown to expect. It had become a sort of game between them to have the TARDIS put her in some useless room instead of her actual destination (usually the library.) She'd landed in the Doctor's closet once, which had led to her taking a ridiculously long, hideous scarf, and using it as a jump rope on their next adventure. (An adventure was sort of like a day in the TARDIS. There wasn't much of a way to determine when she was supposed to sleep to establish a proper schedule. Sleeping was terribly boring, anyway.)

Once she'd landed in the swimming pool. Funny thing about that time was that it actually had been in the library. 

Once she'd just been sent through random corridors with strange lighting, with no seeming exit. This only happened once, because after a while, the creeping sensation she always felt at the back of her neck when the TARDIS rerouted her amplified into sheer terror and she found herself running, running from something she knew wasn't there (maybe it had been there once? she couldn't remember) until she collapsed in a corner and hid her face in her knees. When she looked up next, the library door was ahead of her. 

Of course, there were plenty of ways for the TARDIS to mess with her when she actually reached her destination. (Usually the library. Clara loved the TARDIS' library. There were so many books, books written on other planets before Earth even existed, books written as sequels to books that weren't written yet. Clara read everything she could get her hands on and then some.) She usually didn't mind this. The library was gorgeous, with its high wooden panels and high ceilings and high shelves. It was so tall, it dwarfed Clara, hid her away, and she loved it. The TARDIS led her to random sections that were usually vague insults (apparently the Doctor had an entire section of books on canine mating habits. She never asked.)

The one place she never had any difficulties going to, thankfully, was her own bedroom, although the inside of said bedroom changed every day. The TARDIS usually left her things, although she wasn't above hiding them. The layout of the bedroom changed every day- one day blue and one day a sickening shade of yellow-green with pink accents and one day, she was pretty sure her bedroom was two-dimensional. (She did ask the Doctor about that one, how she could exist in 2D. She had been expecting a long, technical explanation, but all he said was "You don't want to know.")

The TARDIS was rather pernicious about food. The refrigerator, which was definitely a refrigerator, not a cooling unit, held different, and increasingly stranger, things each day. Clara and the Doctor always ate together, though it was rather unlike a family dinner, since a family dinner was always at a specific time. Time was a little pointless in the TARDIS and so they just ate whenever it was possible. The Doctor wasn't allowed to cook, not after the frog coconuts, and so Clara did all the cooking. She was lucky if half the ingredients were even recognizable. The two constants in the TARDIS kitchen were tea and its components (even aliens can be British) and, strangely enough, pineapple. She had made pretty much every variation on pineapples that she could think of.

She wasn't really all that terrible at cooking. It was just soufflés that always escaped her. 

What she knew the most about the TARDIS was that she was never predictable. The only thing one could reliably expect the TARDIS to do was be unpredictable, even if one was the Doctor. (It wasn't his fault that the TARDIS didn't always agree with him on when and where to land.)  The TARDIS did as she liked. But the thing was, she always had a reason, even if sometimes it was just because it would be funny. That's what the Doctor had said anyway, and who knew the TARDIS better than him? 

So one day, after being deposited in what looked like a nursery (albeit a nursery attacked by an angry rainbow paintball gun) she frowned at the room in general, running her fingers over the smooth metal surface of what was probably an alien crib. "What is it about me?" she asked irritably. 

She received no answer, of course. The TARDIS couldn't talk in the traditional  sense of the word. But from that point on, a pattern began. Clara was mildly unnerved, to say the least, if simply because the TARDIS didn't do patterns. But the pattern itself was more than a little creepy. Every once in a while, there would be two words, two words that would follow her around wherever she went. She opened her closet to see two words blazed on the front of one of her dresses. There were alphabet magnets on the fridge organized to spell them out. She didn't ask the Doctor about it. After all, it was just the TARDIS playing around with her again. 

But one day Clara turned the page to 394 and all of a sudden the whole book was BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF and she was done.

She brought the book to the Doctor immediately, and strangely enough the TARDIS led her straight to him. It usually took her half an hour to find him when she didn't actually know where she was, and at least ten minutes when she did. He was half-in and half-out of a kitchen cabinet, and she didn't bother to ask what he was doing, or to ask him to come out. Grabbing him around the ankle, Clara pulled and he rolled straight of the cabinet, an offended look on his face and his hair in disarray. 

"Clara," he whined, but she simply put the book in his face.

"Explain?" she asked. The words gave her a creeping sensation she couldn't explain. It was close to the TARDIS shivers she got, but just a little different.

He took the book, sitting up, and his face went grave. "They're not supposed to come in here, they never have before." Flipping the book to the cover, he looked askance at her. "Love's Labours Won? Really?" 

Blushing, she mumbles, "I was curious, and it seemed special."

"Oh it is," the Doctor replied, grinning at her in a way that made his mouth just a bit too big. "Only copy left in the universe. Good old Will. He never actually finished it, you know, ran into a nasty bit of trouble with some witches, but they weren't really witches-"

"Doctor," Clara said, tapping his nose. "Stop that."

"…the words are everywhere, all over time and space. A while ago, the TARDIS… got a bit out of hand and spread those words all over." 

"So if the TARDIS was the one who did it initially, why would she put the words in here?" Clara asked, moving to the mahogany table and hoisting herself onto its surface. "Especially since it's just for me? After all, she seems to live to mess about with me." 

The Doctor sits up and frowns at her. "She doesn't hate you. You wouldn't be able to do much at all if she hated you." The walls hum, seemingly in response, and Clara concedes with a nod.

"It's just unusual, is all. She never sticks to patterns. Doctor, how did the TARDIS influence space-time at all? Doesn't she just travel?"

The Doctor frowned at her, then went to the refrigerator and pulled out a banana. "One of my, ah, former traveling companions-"

"Doctor," Clara interjected, "I'm not silly, I know there were more before me. 'He lost someone very dear to him', indeed." Who had told her that? "It's okay if you don't want to talk about them, but I don't mind if you do. Stop tiptoeing around it, okay?"

"Rose," said the Doctor, peeling his banana. "Her name was Rose. Blonde and feisty. Decided she wanted to look into the heart of the TARDIS. Old girl always liked Rose, so instead of burning her away immediately she got inside her instead."

"I'm not sure that's better," murmured Clara. 

"It wasn't," the Doctor agreed, shrugging. He moved to sit on the table with her- there were, of course, chairs, but tables were just that much better. 

Clara turned her head just the tiniest bit to the left to look at him. "Who were they? The people you took. Why them? And why me?"

"There's something about you." His eyes took on a thoughtful quality. "Not always something special, least not at first. Not on the outside. You're just little humans. There have always been so many humans. A bit biased, aren't I? But. Well. I think you're all unhappy. Just a little bit. Just enough to want to run away with me. But that's just the littlest bit. All curious, and all so pushy! Shy companions are definitely not a thing. I sort of wish I had one though, maybe they'd stop having quite so many opinions." 

Clara turned and frowned at him.

"Oh, sorry Clara, not that your opinions aren't important, just that you have so many of them and sometimes they get in the way. But they're all longing for something else, something bigger. They want to run and never stop."

"You love them," said Clara.

"Yes."

She smiled at him softly.

"They usually love me too," the Doctor murmured. "Not in quite the right way, sometimes. But that's okay, it's all well and good in the end." 

Clara tilted her head, smile gone."Am I…"

"Hm?" he asked, brought out of his musing. He turned towards her, considering her face. "No. No, I don't think so." The Doctor smiled at her, mouth staying a proper size this time.

Clara kissed his forehead. The walls buzzed, and the Doctor gaped at her. (He seemed to think he was the only one with the power of the forehead kiss.)

She hopped down from the table and retrieved her book, which had gone back to its proper state of being. Glancing at the walls around her, she laughed. "You were right, Doctor. She doesn't really hate me, does she?" 

The next time she went to her bedroom, a rush of water soaked her as she opened the door. 


End file.
